Dustsceawung & Other Kinds of Breath

PART ONE

Chapter One. Whispers of the Kashbah

An accidental encounter with the tender humanism of the maioliche istoriato decorating the heart of Mazara del Vallo’s Kashbah.

Breath. Dust. Loss. It all speaks of life.

Stepping up and stepping out between delight and decay: Not without its poignancy . . .

And then this . . .

Inexplicable dereliction.

Chapter Two. On the wings of prayer

I stepped through a small wooden door and found myself entering a shell of a Jesuit chapel; now inhabited by pigeons, blackbirds and stray dogs. Something twitched in my marrow as I stood in the middle of this circular shell and stared up into a circumference of sky. I took pictures of the decaying walls and derelict cherubs still frozen in poised, pubescent anticipation.

Something about this small place feels so wrong.

And it’s not the dereliction per se, not the rope loosely discarded, from once having kept visitors at a distance, nor the piles of broken cornices and rubble that speak for some archeological commentary that no one seems to care about.

It’s something in the air circulating between the columns and open sky; a whispering torment of unspoken things that still need an airing.

Chapter Three. Whispering Dust.

A whispering by the dust of all that’s gone, rather than what’s been left behind.

The beautiful mystery of the Elymian ruins at Segesta; its Doric temple and Roman amphitheatre with a stunning backdrop stretching to the coast.

We say we’re off to see some ruins. What we find is a legacy of imaginative resilience.

What does it ask of us ?

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This pictorial essay, in three parts, is from a trip I took in the last week of April, 2017 to the western province of Trapani and its coastline, in Sicily. My thanks to Future Travel and David Smooke for first publishing it in May 2017.